Strange Powers Read online

  Again, he has the power to stop people smoking. He described the process to me as follows. The subject sits opposite him, and Robert 'attunes' his mind to him. Robert then induces a feeling of numbness in his own fingers. When the subject says: 'My fingers are feeling numb,' he knows the attuning process is complete. At which point he says: 'This is because you're attuned to me. And I can now assure you that you'll never feel the need to smoke again.' This, he says, has been a failure in only one case—and even then, the man gave it up for three years. This sounds closer to telepathy—or straight hypnosis—than to the use of the superconscious. What is the relation between this power of suggestion and the superconscious? Again, I have no idea.

  And yet I am strongly inclined to believe that we are dealing with natural forces. I have just been playing back the tape I made of a conversation with Leftwich a year ago, and I reflect that Paracelsus would have thought it was sorcery. And so it is, in a way. I know about magnetism imprinting voice patterns in iron oxide; but it still seems strange that a tape should be capable of carrying all the vibrations of the living voice—just as it seems strange to me that a wavy line on the surface of a gramophone record can carry all the complexities of a great orchestra. So it is not difficult to believe that there may be other vibrations and fields of which we are at present ignorant. As I look across the room now, I can see a photograph on the back of a book jacket—a perfectly recognizable face. I pick it up and place it within three inches of my eyes. Now I can see just how little information the page actually carries—just a few blurry patches of black and grey. I hold it at arm's length—again, it is a face. My eyes can obviously 'decode' these patches, and read meaning into them—provided they are given enough of them to form a judgement. As Robert Leftwich walks over the ground, looking for water, some faculty as natural as sight decodes a set of vibrations, and tells him when he has found it. If I take the same dowsing rod, nothing happens; I am, comparatively speaking, 'short sighted'.

  But amid all my uncertainties, I am fairly sure of one thing. Robert Leftwich is a non-passive personality; in fact, he is a highly active personality, whose psyche has always exerted a definite pressure on the outside world, in the form of curiosity, expectancy, interest. Such pressure is like water; it finds its way into cracks, and enlarges them. His powers are the outcome of his attitude. He demonstrates, to my satisfaction, that psychic powers are a matter of choice, not of chance.

  Two

  Mrs Eunice Beattie

  As an 'occult investigator', I am aware that I'm thoroughly unsatisfactory. When I ought to be asking penetrating questions, or devising means of testing the truth of what I am being told, I simply listen and make notes. This, I suspect, is because I see the world through the eyes of a novelist. In a sense, I am incurious about people—about their affairs, their lives; but I'm interested in the way their minds work, in their motivations. From a fairly early age, I developed the conviction that most people waste their lives because they see the world falsely. Anyone can understand what is meant if we say that someone is 'utterly conventional': that such a person accepts a set of social values without question, like a sheep that never feels curious about what lies on the other side of the hedge. But we find it altogether more difficult to grasp that we all live according to a set of conventions of consciousness: that, on the whole, we see and hear what we expect to see and hear, and that there may be enormous areas of experience that cannot get past our mental filters. For example, can you imagine Mr Pickwick appreciating the music of Beethoven, or the painting of Goya? (Can you imagine Dickens himself appreciating it, if it comes to that?) Could Jane Austen, even with the greatest stretch of the imagination, understand the murders committed by the Charles Manson 'family'? Our perceptions have certain inbuilt limitations; yet, in a sense, it is we who limit them, as we might turn down the volume control on the radio to what we consider a 'bearable volume'. This is why Rimbaud dreamed of an 'ordered derangement of the senses', deliberately pushing the senses beyond their normal limits.

  This is why I would find Robert Leftwich an interesting character, even if I cannot state positively that all his claims are true and unexaggerated. He is aware that the normal boundaries are not absolutes; he wants to break out beyond them. Like Rimbaud, he has already rejected the 'communal fife-world'. A world in which there were millions of people like him would be, for me, a more interesting place.

  And the same applies to Mrs Eunice Beattie, who is otherwise about as unlike Leftwich as could be imagined. Outwardly she appears to be a perfectly ordinary person—a retired nurse, devoted to her married son and his family, living in an attractive suburb of Plymouth. She has written (and typed) hundreds of pages that reveal that either (a) she has a remarkable mind, or (b) that she has 'tuned in' to other intelligences and transcribed some of their ideas.

  I have not kept a record of when I first met Mrs Beattie, but it must have been in the early months of 1972. It was at the time when I was still receiving floods of correspondence about The Occult, which had appeared the previous autumn. Mrs Beattie's letter said that she hoped I wouldn't consider her a crank, but that she had been producing automatic writing that seemed to her to answer some basic questions about human purpose and destiny. I replied that I'd like to see some of it, and asked her if she would like to come and have lunch at the Westward TV studios next time I was there. I gave her the date.

  I'd forgotten about her when a message came to say that a lady wanted to see me at the desk. I went down, and found Mrs Beattie looking nervously out of the window, as if tempted to dash out into the street. I asked her to come into the canteen for lunch. As soon as we sat down, she handed me a manila folder full of manuscript. I opened it, and saw that the first page was headed with a quotation from one of Arthur Waley's translations of a Chinese poem. I read it with a certain amount of pleasure—an understandable reaction, I think, when one is faced with a great sheaf of original manuscript that may be totally unreadable. It is like finding an oasis in a desert. I asked her if she liked Chinese poetry. She looked blank; then, when I pointed to the Waley quotation, said she had no idea who Arthur Waley was. It had simply been 'dictated' to her. I glanced at the rest of the typescript, and saw mentions of Walt Whitman and Angelus Silesius. 'What about these? Have you read them?' 'No. Who is Walt Whitman?'

  As we ate, I looked at her curiously. She seemed shy, rather tense, as if trying to cut herself off from the sounds of the room. She was small, attractive, around sixty; a journalist might take the easy way out and describe her as motherly, but the rather smart hair style and the neat clothes reminded me that she had been a hospital sister—she had told me that in her letter. Very much the type children take to—as I discovered when she met my children. She didn't strike me as in any way a crank; or, for that matter, anything like my idea of a 'psychic' neither the professional spirit medium, nor the visionary peasant woman of the type described by Yeats. I found her very difficult to place.

  She came and watched the program being videotaped, sitting quietly in a corner of the studio without speaking to anybody. Afterwards I asked her if she'd found it interesting. 'Oh, yes. Fascinating.' But I had a feeling she wouldn't have said so unless I'd asked her.

  Clearly, I wasn't going to be able to assess her without seeing rather more of her. I asked her if she could come to my home that weekend. She looked anxious. 'Are you sure your wife won't object?' 'I don't think so.' 'Perhaps you'd better ask her first and let me know.'

  Before we left the studio, I asked her how she had come to write to me. I expected her to say that she'd read something about The Occult, or seen me on television. Again she surprised me. 'Your name came floating into my head one day. I'd no idea who you were. Then, a week later, I saw something about you in a newspaper. I had an odd feeling that I ought to get in touch with you.'

  When I told Joy I'd asked Mrs Beattie over for the weekend, she asked: 'What sort of a person is she?' and I had to admit I didn't know. I could only say she seemed a perfectly
ordinary, normal person and I didn't think she'd be a difficult guest. Apart from Robert Leftwich, my acquaintance with 'psychics' had been small. In my early twenties, when I was working at United Dairies, Chiswick, I had met a woman called Grace who worked in the canteen (I have forgotten her other name), and I had been convinced that she possessed unusual powers. She seemed to be an ordinary, middle-aged cockney lady, of the kind you'd find behind almost any counter in any works canteen in the country; but Joy and I spent an evening with her, and I realized that she 'knew' a great deal—in the sense that Gurdjieff did; and the things she was able to tell me about myself startled me. Mrs Beattie seemed as ordinary as Grace; and I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. I am averagely skeptical, and I was aware of the possibility that she might be suffering from delusions, or might be making it all up to make herself interesting. I didn't believe for a moment that she was suffering from delusions. Neither did it seem likely that she was making it all up—although I had to entertain the possibility. She was a widow, living on her own—and, by her own admission, without many close friends. I settled down to reading her manuscript, hoping it might provide clues. And the first thing that was obvious was that if she was pulling my leg, then it wasn't a recently conceived plan. She'd written a lot, and over a long period; there were diary references dating back ten years. And it soon struck me, from the general tone of her writing, that she is deeply and genuinely preoccupied with what we loosely term 'the spiritual'. Now when some average, not-very-intelligent person becomes obsessed with religion, the result is an obvious feeling of unbalance; their minds become lop-sided; they spout the jargon, but it is almost a meaningless noise. In fact, it becomes a kind of mask, designed to hide their stupidity. The most obvious thing about Mrs Beattie's writing was that it was carefully and painstakingly saying something, and what it was saying was close to what all saints and mystics have always said, 'We are completely dependent on the creative energy of God, from our first breath. Our lives are usually wrecked by our sense of personal power.' Aldous Huxley's anthology of mysticism, The Perennial Philosophy, is full of these statements about the need to abandon the 'Self, to become identified with the Not-Self. 'There are many,' said Mrs Beattie, 'who are branches of a tree that are cut off from the main stem, and who do not know they are dying.' I got a feeling she knew what she was talking about; this was not just religious gobbledygook. And there were places where I suddenly found myself reading with increased interest. 'Man in his spiritual state is both male and female, and can thus create for himself—just as his Father can. Christ said that all he could do, men could do also, when they had come to full realization.' For some months before meeting Mrs Beattie, I had been struggling with the obscure but impressive work of a Hungarian philosopher, Charlotte Bach, whose studies of sexual perversion—particularly of 'trans-sexuality' (i.e. the man's desire to become a woman, and vice versa) had led her to a completely new theory of evolution, in which the inner tensions created by this sexual ambiguity drive man up the evolutionary ladder. She had also noted that some human beings achieve a precarious balance through the creative act. Mrs Beattie seemed to be stating the same thing much more simply. In many ways, she might be poles apart from the formidably intellectual and erudite Mrs Bach; but she seemed equally aware of the possibilities of an evolution of consciousness. A disciple of Gurdjieff s once said that his system was 'a method of preventing your past from becoming your future'; the same preoccupation ran throughout these manuscripts of Mrs Beattie's.

  Now if that was all there was to it, I would have no difficulty about placing Mrs Beattie. I would say that she was one of my 'outsiders', driven by deeper urges than most people, and therefore feeling rather out of place in our ordinary, working society. That in spite of this, in spite of a lack of formal education, she had gradually taught herself to think for herself, and achieved some degree of insight into the problem of the evolution of spiritual consciousness.'

  But her writing made it clear that it was more complicated than that. After some study, it seemed to me there were three distinct aspects to Mrs Beattie. To begin with, there was the straight religious aspect: the preoccupation with what most religious people would call salvation, and which she is inclined to call evolution. Next, there was the occultist strain, which might be reminiscent of the work of Emanuel Swedenborg:

  'I went out of my body one night, in the usual way, but instead of determining my destination. I was called instead; I found that I was on a high plateau, up in a mountainous country; it was very beautiful. There were a group of people, all dressed in white. One of these was my teacher, and he came to me, and said that this night, they were going to show me some scenes from the history of the world. I sat down among them, and then picture after picture came before me, and I sat and watched as I saw the world as it used to be. They told me I was looking at scenes in the race memory.'

  And this was closely connected to another aspect: pre-vision or prophecy. Some of these sound more like Nostradamus than Swedenborg: 'The coast of France will change overnight. Paris will fall to rocket bombardment.' 'One man shall govern the world, centuries ahead; far, too far ahead for us to see.' 'A rain of meteors on the earth; I think it is a periodic cycle.' She also predicts that Rome will become a heap of ashes (this may be connected to another prophecy to the effect that the Roman Catholic Church—and all others—will fail), and that the last Pope will be called Peter. She says that there is now a child in Asia, about ten years old, who will govern all the east. 'A more evil man has never been born.' New York will be shaken by a great earthquake. 'This will be caused by the rising of the east coast out of the water; this will cause a tidal wave, and Ireland will be covered by water.' (Edgar Cayce, the American healer and prophet, made similar predictions about the east coast of America.) The Chinese will conquer Europe as far as Scandinavia and most of the populations of Italy and Austria will be wiped out by aerial weapons. Another entry reads: 'May 1969: A new planet will be discovered at the end of 1970—there may be another one later on. Nov. 197x: This was verified on TV last week.' A later entry clarifies this: '3 Jan. 73: Outer planet, Poseidon, confirmed as belonging to our system. Theory of explosion within our system confirmed, as theory of our scientists to explain odd orbit of Poseidon and last two planets.'

  From my point of view, the 'religious' parts of her writing were the least interesting. 'Each man must follow his own path to God, and there is no one way. Only his own personal way—and this Christ will teach him when he opens his mind and heart to him.' True, no doubt, but it could have been written by anybody.

  Altogether more interesting was the description of direct experience scattered among the pages. This, for example:

  'I, too, was once the same; I did not believe anything but the evidence of my own senses. Yet something pulled at my heart, and I was not happy. I longed to believe in something or someone; I also wanted to know why the universe was, why men were, and what for, and why we were born, and died, and where did we go when we died? ... There was a reason, I knew there must be. No one would go to the trouble of creating a universe for no reason. So I tried to reach this Person by talking to Him. I spoke in my own way, being essentially a simple and direct person ... I told this Person what was troubling me, I said I wanted to know, and was willing to learn, and I would work hard to understand, if He would tell me. He said: "First, you must be tried... "He told me to meet Him every day at the same hour. This I did most faithfully, and little by little, he taught me and trained me, until I reached the point where I cannot learn more until I pass over into the soul world.' She adds that 'He' speaks into the mind, like a silent whisper, which has the effect of filling her with joy.

  In another place, she describes how she was taught astral projection. 'I was to rest flat upon either a bed, divan or floor, supported by a pillow—if necessary covered by a quilt. Then to begin recollection—this was in the early days. Later I relaxed through habit and began meditation immediately: first step: concentration upon mind,
relax the body; it becomes still and heavy. Second step: the mind slowly begins to become quiet, the breathing slows. Concentration into the direct center of conscious mind—it stills and smoothes out. Concentration has forgotten body, and is entirely closed into the center of mind. The mind stills, and becomes smooth as a still pond, then stops. This is the point where one looks into a silence, or darkness... yet it is not darkness, but a light so intense as to blind one, and one sees darkness. There one is poised and utterly still, intense concentration, and listening intensely. And one waits and waits and waits. Sometimes there is nothing but an answering warmth. Sometimes a voice speaks and one sees exactly what is said. If one is needed for a lesson, or some other reason, this is the point where I leave the body. First there is a short blank, and then I am fully conscious beside my body. At first the second body was nude, but I was taught to will it clothed. Occasionally, I would pass other souls who were unconscious, and at times beginners who were not clothed, but answering a summons—one can always tell.'

  Well, all this was fairly plain, and what I now needed was to talk further with Mrs Beattie to clarify and enlarge. I met her off the train at St Austell on a Friday evening. On the journey home, she talked about her son John, his wife and children, and various other practical matters; she seemed to have no inclination to talk about her writing. But she confirmed that much of it was 'automatic': that she felt a sudden impulse to sit down and begin to write; her hand twitched, and as soon as she seized a pen, it began writing.